Revisions, Calving, and Not so Much Fun

It’s 4 am and I’m shocked I’m awake. My body seems to think it’s time to get up and start the day. Not sure why since every muscle in my body aches and I look like I got into a fight with a cow and lost. I have bruises the size of my hand.

Next time I’m going to forgo the snowmobile ride through the forest to look for a calf and just walk through the waist high snow drifts. It would be eaier and less painful. 😀

These last two days have been taxing on my strength and sleep. Between feeding and loading the truck with hay, chopping wood, checking on calving cows, losing calves due to weather, chasing first-time calving cows up to the barn to calve because we were unable to get them into the corals due to piles of snow, pulling the calf of a cow too long in labor that we thought might be dead but was still alive, and struggling to keep the little shit alive when it’s mother has no interest in her. And inbetween it all, I’m still working hard to accomplish a dent in my revisions of Once a Valkyrja. It’s been a difficult two days. I’m pooped, and yet I’m unable to sleep.

The manuscript of Once a Valkyrja has been on my mind. It is by far the hardest for me to revise and easiest to procrastinate working on. Like with the manuscript of Loving the Goddess of Love there is something off about the storyline. Something that is bugging me on a subsconcious level. Something I haven’t been able to pinpoint completely.

Yestetday I fixed the problem of story pacing by reordering some of the scenes. The storyline started out too quick, slowed way down for the relationship building, and then speed up to catch up with the rest of the story. Today I hope to unlock another secret of why this story bothers me so much as it is. Maybe the scene sequence at the end should be shuffled around or rewritten altogether? Or maybe the pacing for the end should be slowed down a bit?

4 thoughts on “Revisions, Calving, and Not so Much Fun”

I had the same problem with Ties of Blood… it just wasn’t “right” but I added some chapters in the middle and combined some at the beginning and I think that has helped. I know you’ll fix up Once a Valkyrja in no time 😉

My biggest problem was that I have two plots, the story plot and the romance plot, and rather than have them blended together, I stopped the story plot to address the romance, before returning to the story plot. This caused it to drag and it in the middle. I realized yesterday that I just had too much going on in the beginning so I took out the first two scenes and moved it to the middle. Then I rearranged some of the other scenes, which seems to give it a more even pacing. Now I just have to figure out the other stuff that bothers me about the story. Something just doesn’t sit right.

Wow. I had no idea you were that busy. Take it easy (as easy as you can with children and the cows to deal with).

Sometimes what helps me with a book when I get stuck is to imagine what if this or that happened or mentally thinking of how shifting scenes around would help. You’re probably already doing that. Another thing I’ve had to do is put the story on hold and work on something else. Sometimes inspiration clicks when you aren’t even thinking about it. Then, at other times, I press through and write anyway. I come up with a lot to toss out, but sometimes it spurs the ideas.

Calving time and haying time are the busiest times of the year, but we’ve never had this much trouble. I’ve never had to run all over a meadow after a cow, or try and get the same dumb cow to accept her calf. *sigh*

So far I’ve created a brief sketch outline of all three books and then read through the whole manuscript again. I decided to rearranged some of the scenes which slows down the pacing is some places and speeds it up in other. It seems to flow better. I think there is still something off about the book. I might rewrite the end, there are some things that I don’t like there, but for now I’m going to revise it until I find the problem. 😀

Writing is definitely not as easy as people seem to think it is. It’s more than writing down a bunch of words and sending it out into the world. It’s writing and rewriting, revisions, edits, and proofreading. Then comes the formating, book layouts, publishing, and marketing. Okay that made me tired just writing that. lol

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